


How it starts.

by Bakuras



Category: Tiger & Bunny
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 10:05:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7356898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakuras/pseuds/Bakuras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts with a deal.  Blood for blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How it starts.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a short thing I wrote over the course of the last few days.  
> I'm still working out the kinks of when to refer to him as Virgil vs. Andrew, so I know it can get a little muddy!!!

It doesn’t start with love.It barely even starts with _like_. 

Then again, it doesn’t entirely start with _dislike_ , either.Or even entirely distrust.But Lunatic’s prey has always been a tier above greed (even through the red-cellophane tinting of near blind hatred, he can see that Schneider is no murderer) and there’s no telling which side he’d actually take.After all, _eye for an eye_ doesn’t necessarily translate to _eye for a heart._

 

It starts with a deal.Blood for blood. 

Yuri doesn’t offer freedom.He gives it, but Virgil would rather take his revenge and leave himself to rot than taste freedom without death.Letting Schneider loose at the same time is, admittedly, unfair, and a bit like sending a lapdog to fight off a velociraptor, but justice doesn’t demand that everyone get a fighting chance.

It starts with the two hours it takes for Schneider to die - and that’s two hours _only_ _after_ the forty-five minutes spent lacing his ribs with small, twisted wire rods.None of the penetrations are fatal on their own, but he uncoils the wire slowly when they’re finally all inside, letting his lungs and heart shave themselves down against them. 

There’s a point, though, when he eventually gets to convulsing on the dirty ground, spitting blood and foam and mucus at Virgil’s feet, that he does end up finishing the job on his own. 

Dropping a two-ton block of steel on the man’s head isn’t exactly something he’d call _merciful_ , but it’s fast.He’s not a monster, after all. 

 

It doesn’t start with idle chat making way for something deeper.Quite the opposite - what were once formal conversations (spiritual, almost _cryptic_ to anybody but them) become lighthearted, the first instance of _playfulness_ that either of them have felt for as long as they can remember.

For Virgil, it starts the first time he sees Yuri laugh. 

For Yuri, it starts with the rapid-fire _barrage_ of information he’s met with when he offhandedly asks about a small device on Virgil’s desk; with eyes that normally leer with the intensity of a hawk lighting up and almost glimmering. 

 

And then it starts, it really, _really_ starts - with both of them reading quietly on the couch, and with a NEXT that can rob an entire city of light.

It starts with a room illuminated only with small blue flame. 

With the acknowledgment of the word they had each been avoiding for months now - **_crush_** suits small children and feels unbecoming in adults, but here they are, pretending their throats aren’t dry and that their hands aren’t trembling.

With eyes adjusting enough to see that a blackened city can no longer drown out the starlight.

Sex is nothing. Virgil fucked men.He fucked a _lot_ of men.He fucked men for information, for files, for passwords, for leverage.If it was sex he wanted, he could probably have it.But for the first time, that can come later. 

It starts with a kiss.

 

 

It’s been seven months.

Yuri trusts him.He does.The idea that the man he’s looking at is _anything_ like the men that Yuri learned to hate and fear is so far removed from his thoughts of him that he’s actually disgusted with himself for even _considering_ the comparison.Virgil… _Andrew_ \- looks at him as like nobody ever has, like Yuri was beginning to believe nobody ever would. 

Yuri has never been loved.Not really.His mother looks at him like he drenched and drowned the sun.

But that boy looks at him like he _hung_ it.

 

It’s not that his partner is gentle, either.Even setting aside that his power is one of the greatest that Yuri has personally ever seen, his brutality alone is _terrifying_.Lunatic is a hunter, yes, but Andrew is a _wolf_ \- blood dripping from its muzzle and drying at the edges of it, shreds of flesh caught in the spaces between its teeth. 

He kills in the same way he makes love.Primal.Merciless.No breath is anything less than sacrosanct.No movement is anything less than holy.

Gentleness isn’t his nature.So that can’t be it.

He can lie through his teeth on his worst days - about death, about vengeance.His persona has never so much as splintered, even when faced with the snake that he was put on earth to annihilate.But he never could lie about love. 

His love is as all-consuming as his hate.Yuri can’t doubt that.Nobody could.Nobody who has ever been _held_ like that, at least. 

But there’s something so, _so_ **raw** about it. 

He’s familiar with the concept of Pavlov’s dog - two unconnected things that are so frequently paired that they eventually begin to feel inseparable.He understands that a _bell_ doesn’t mean _kibble_ just as _intimacy_ doesn’t mean _deep, purple bruising,_ but it’s a trained response.And he’s been trained too well, it seems.

It doesn’t only go one way, either.There’s days when he’s afraid to touch him, as though his father’s blood will flip a switch under the right conditions.It can’t.It _won’t._

It brings him no comfort to think that even if it _does_ , Andrew can fight him off.Because he won’t kill him.He won’t kill him if he deserves it.

He’s as shackled to his own loyalty as Yuri is. 

 

 

It doesn’t start with love. 

Love started far too long ago.Longer than either of them were aware.This - _freedom_ (not absolute, not complete, but Yuri doesn’t tense for the first few minutes when he’s held anymore, and kisses don’t feel like something he’ll pay for in broken bones) - starts and restarts a hundred times before he finally accepts that there isn’t a catch.

It starts with coming home to his boyfriend _(that…feels good to say, he realizes passively)_ idly chattering with his mother while he cooks, and with the sudden awareness that he _trusts_ him with her.Her, the person he threw any chance of happiness he might have ever had away to protect, who he’s most terrified of losing, who could do anything, say anything, to him and he’d love her more than anything else in the world regardless.

It starts in the summer, when the automatic waterer for Yuri’s plants mysteriously breaks down and he goes back to watering them by hand (Andrew’s machines don’t break, not for _anything_ or _anyone_ , so it _must_ be his intuition telling him that Yuri missed having something so simple to care for himself) and again in the coming autumn, when work is heavy, and somehow it begins to work again. 

It starts in the field, when Dragon Kid is about to be the hero to take down Lunatic once and for all, only for their shot to be blocked by a creature made of scraps.Andrew is a _tank_ , and nearly impossible to stop singlehandedly, but _10,000 volts_ is nothing to scoff at, even to him.As well as he can insulate himself, his dominion is still only over a _massive electricity conductor._

He lives.But Yuri doesn’t forget it. 

 

It starts one more time.

With a scar.Something he’s kept secret for as long as they’ve been together.Not because it’s unsightly, or that Yuri cares abundantly for appearances.It’s that with a scar - with _that_ scar, comes a history. 

With _that_ scar, comes truth, comes sacrifice, comes the moment a terrified, confused, sixteen year old boy made the decision to face down one of the strongest NEXT in the world for the sake of love. 

With _that_ scar, comes pain. _His_ pain.

 

So in the end, it starts with truth.

It starts with trust.

It starts with love.


End file.
